Dog Man is one of those cultural phenomena restricted to certain ages – if you’ve had a primary school kid in the past 10 years you’ll know the graphic novels, if you haven’t you won’t.
But trust me, it’s massive – the funny series by Dav Pilkey, about an American cop with a dog’s head and human body has sold more than 70 million copies worldwide, and even had its own box office hit movie last year.
And now… it has its own theatre show.
Dog Man: The Musical is touring the UK for the next year, kicking off at London’s Southbank Centre, where it had its opening night this week.
The show features best friends George and Harold – who also feature as fictional writers and illustrators in Pilkey’s other famous comic book series, ‘Captain Underpants.’
Together, they create their Dog Man character and dream up his adventures with Petey the evil cat and loveable offspring Lil Petey, alongside the police chief and Flippy the cyborg fish.
It has to be said that you need to have read the books to make sense of the stage show – it’s chaotic and relies on the audience knowing the plotline and the characters.
But that’s ok as we had – it’s precisely why we were there. And if you don’t know the plotline, there are plenty of other shows out there for you and your child.
While aimed at kids, they’ve designed a decent chunk of the gags to be funny for adults too, so I laughed along with my seven year old son throughout the 1hr15min-long production.
The musical numbers are impressive and funny – I chuckled along with the opening number, which just went into detail about what an opening number should be.
A number of the cast have excellent, West End-calibre voices too – especially the actors who play Petey the evil cat and Flippy the cyborg fish.
Yes, the show is chaotic and quite disjointed, and at times nonsensical… but so are the books and that is exactly why kids love them. If your child loves Dog Man books, they’ll love this too.
I’d add that after kids hit 6 years of age, there are distinctly less stage shows targeted at them.
Unlike the preschoolers and reception kids, who have scores of Julia Donaldson adaptations to pick from.
This is a really nice, quite low-budget, piece of theatre that is a great way to get your child interested in theatre – especially if, like mine, Dog Man was already responsible for getting them interested in books.
Dog Man: The Musical is aimed at ages 5+ and showing at London’s Southbank, with a UK tour afterwards. Find out more at www.dogman.live